April 26, 2013

Performance (1970) - DVD

by Walter Chaw Emerging in the
middle of one of the most experimental, challenging periods in
cinematic history, Performance--completed in 1968
but shelved until 1970--is a product at once ahead of its time and two
years too late. Had its trippy-dippy, anachronistic cross-cutting and
madly-inappropriate scoring appeared in 1968 (the year of Rosemary's
Baby, Night of the Living Dead, If...,
2001: A Space Odyssey, and the
film to which it perhaps owes its greatest allegiance, Once
Upon a Time in the West), Performance
would've found traction and good company as a foundational film for the
American New Wave instead of as a picture that, for all its foment and
formal revolution, seemed hysterical against a maturing, more sedate(d)
mainstream avant-garde parade of stuff like El
Topo, Zabriskie Point, MASH,
and Five Easy Pieces.

The perspective
offered in hindsight is that Performance, co-helmed
by the great Nicolas Roeg in his directorial debut (Roeg had lensed a
number of British films in the years prior), is very much a product of
1968: psychedelic, hallucinogenic, doomed, freakish, and childish, and
presented by an accomplished cinematographer-turned-director who finds,
in the near absence of narrative and coherent editing, good uses for
colour filters and long tracking shots. (I wonder if, with its kinetic
energy, unabashed sexuality, and hyper-Mod posturing, Performance
isn't ultimately lumped in, unfairly, with desperate flower-power
panderers like Myra Breckinridge and Beyond
the Valley of the Dolls.) The mantra appears to have been
that testosterone pastimes are best told in collisions of imagery; with
Roeg following Performance
with the trancelike Walkabout, the
gynaecological terror of Don't Look Now, and the
domestic subversion of The Man Who Fell to Earth,
it's possible to trace the evolution of boy to man (the dream of
pre-pubescence on to the promise of societal intercourse through to the
failure of expectation) in Roeg's evolution from a chronicler of
obscene, hedonistic pruriences into a disseminator of vague,
apocalyptic poignancies.

Performance opens with violent
sex, jarringly intercut--in what would become an early Roeg hallmark
(note similar moments in Don't
Look Now and, especially, The Man Who Fell to Earth)--with images of transformation and scored like a horror film or, more to
the point, like Ennio Morricone's human-voiced laments in his work with
Sergio Leone. Throughout Performance, this idea of
the transformative power of sex will be explored through androgyny,
uncomfortably-sexualized violence, transferences of persona, and
exchanges of material wealth. It undermines totem and ritual in its
tale of gangster Chas (James Fox), who runs afoul of his organization
and goes literally underground in the hippie den of drugged-out rocker
Turner (Mick Jagger) and a couple of his most ardent groupies. It's
interesting to me that in a recent documentary on the music used by
"The Sopranos", that show's producers said The Rolling
Stones and Elvis Costello were the most
appropriate accompaniments to "this thing of ours," since Jagger's
character's gradual disintegration into Chas feels as organic as Johnny
Depp's appropriation of Keith Richards for the ideal pirate model.

There's something
to the idea that any endeavour employed in the influence of other men
for the purposes of power (and, as it follows, reproductive rights to a
wider variety of women) has, at its root, the same kind of ruthless
ambition and the appearance of casual cool. Too much to say that Performance
is the reverse-distaff version of the reminiscent-sounding Persona,
though the last half of the film is spent in
relative isolation after the first half's insane pace
levels off into something with the steady cadence of more familiar
fare. But
where Persona can be read as a distillation of the
history of storytelling (and although Performance performs
an image-morph dialogue in obvious homage to Persona
DP Sven Nykvist's bit of grotesque showiness), Performance
is a summation of how storytelling is an essential component to
reproductive
success. Persona is about the life of
the mind; Performance is about the life of the
testicles.

Dealing with music,
photography, poetry, literature, and film in terms of that exclusively
male will to power, Roeg establishes the tropes that would guide his Seventies output, offering explanation along the way--tied to his
marriage to Theresa Russell on the heels of the troubled production Bad
Timing (1980)--of why nothing he's done in the past two
decades has had the same fundamental power of this conceptual cycle. It
strikes me as pithy that Performance comes on like
a turgid dick and Bad Timing ends, after a fashion,
with semen stains: when Chas takes a bad mushroom and Roeg drops us
into a proverbial rabbit hole all of soothsaying hippie-chicks talking
priapism while breaking down a gun, the proper touchstone isn't
Bergman, but rather Lewis Carroll's demented coming-of-age dreadfuls.
"Nothing is true, everything is permitted," says Turner to Chas as Chas
peers at his evolving form in a looking glass (and the use of mirrors
in the picture touches on everything from Borges to Lacan to William
Burroughs to Jean Genet): in that moment, mine the picture's thesis that
the utopia/hedonism of the sixties was finding itself at this
philosophical dead end of borrowed theology, fashionable politicism,
and the irrecoverable deflation of flesh and blood.

Roeg suggests, and
I tend to agree, that we've never completely recovered as a society
from the well-intentioned freedom of this period in our cultural
development--that we never stopped agreeing to be animals long enough
to bargain with being human. Performance
should be seen in repertoire with Kubrick's 2001,
both interested as they are in connecting the dots between our primate
past and our primal future. (Turner's extended music video-like
boardroom rant is tuned in the same key as the hotel epilogue of
Kubrick's picture.) There's explanation in there, too, of Performance's
Seven Wonders of the Ancient World motif: we were always building
monuments to our power and we always will be--performance is just one
avenue to that same old immortality.

THE DVDPerformance finally comes to
DVD courtesy Warner in a nice 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer
that alas hugs the top and bottom of the frame a little tightly
following the opening-credits sequence, which is pillarboxed at the
European aspect ratio of 1.66:1. Otherwise, it looks fine for a picture
that hasn't aged all that well visually--at least, not as well as
Roeg's other output from this period. I wonder if a general lack of
care with the negative during its first tumultuous run has resulted in
less than perfect elements; the extended sex scene shot on Bolex
featuring Mick and his two lovelies (rumoured to be real, as most of
Roeg's sex scenes are) especially suffers from colour blanching and
print scratches. There remains about it, however, that indescribable
warmth of cinema from this era shot by people who knew what they were
doing. (Roeg, a camera operator on Lawrence of Arabia,
most certainly falls in that camp.) On the other hand, the DD 1.0 mono
audio is a major disappointment, given the musical nature of the second
half of the film (and the acerbic sound-editing of the first, which
recalls Walter Murch's early experiments in noise-as-wallpaper)--it all
sounds like a sausage forced through the eye of a needle, and as
sharp-eared observers have pointed out elsewhere, the trademark line
"Here's to Old England!" is inexplicably muted during the "Memo from
Turner" sequence.

"Influence and Controversy" (25 mins.) is a
banal retrospective that gathers a variety of talking heads to expound
at length on the film as a distillation of the '60s counterculture.
When some dude (Colin MacCabe, "Professor at the University of
Pittsburgh") proclaims it the first picture to portray the swinging
London scene, I began to worry that my dyslexia had confused
Antonioni's Blowup as being from 1976 as opposed
to 1966. It does Performance no great service to
assemble misinformed individuals on the apparent basis of their
priggish British accents. Much time is devoted to a remembrance of
tragic art prodigy Donald Cammell, listed as co-director/writer of the
picture; certainly it's intoxicating to make hay about a film about
schism directed in tandem (and indeed, editor Antony Gibbs and producer
Sanford Lieberson can't resist), but like Roeg's work on films like
Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451, I'm inclined to see
Roeg's auteur tendencies as asserting themselves like a dominant gene.
Stories from the set and stories about the casting round out the brief
docu, with the proceedings grinding to a halt whenever Prof. MacCabe
chimes in with facile plot observations and surface analyses of casting
decisions and so forth (do we really need him to tell us about the
stylistic dichotomy between the film's halves?). Maybe that's all that
was asked of the man, but seriously, guys, I'm still a little shaken
about the Blowup thing.

"Memo from Turner" (5 mins.) is a vintage
featurette essentially composed of B-roll and promotional ephemera
that underscores Jagger as the key draw to the picture. Lots of shots
of an old Moog production board and behind-the-scenes bits of Jagger
cutting up with Cammell constitute the bulk, such as it is. Roeg's next
collaboration with a rock star, David Bowie and The Man Who
Fell to Earth, brings a real sense of enduring vision to what
Jagger begins here--but that's beyond the purview of this piece. A
theatrical trailer (3 mins.) highlights the violence and drugs, the
transvestitism, and the Jagger, leading me to a couple of conclusions:
that it's no real surprise Performance wasn't a
blockbuster; and that Jagger snarling "You're a faggy little leather
boy with a smaller piece of stick" in a movie trailer is probably a
thing forever of the past. Originally published: April 27,
2007.